Animalia

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

  Gaby sits on the edge of the mattress and pulls back the sheet to reveal the emaciated face of her sister, who tries to bury it in the bolster. She gets to her feet, folds the sheet and the blankets at the end of the bed, leaving Catherine naked, curled up on the mattress, her face covered by her hands, then she grabs her sister’s legs, drags her to the edge of the bed, sits down beside her, slips an arm around her shoulder and sits her up next to her.

  They are now sitting pressed against each other, Catherine shivering in her arms as her sister strokes her back, her left arm, but each stroke of her palm is painful and the face pressed into the sororal neck is twisted into a rictus of terrible weariness, the lips curled back over pale gums.

  ‘Calm down,’ Gabrielle says. ‘Take it easy, everything’s going to be fine…’

  She slips an arm beneath the damp, hairy fold of her sister’s armpit, presses one hand against her side, presses the other against the mattress for support and stands up, heaving Catherine to her feet as she whimpers and almost collapses. Together they take small steps across the room to the bathroom, where Gabrielle sits her on the edge of the tub, then dips a hand into the water to check the temperature before turning off the taps.

  ‘I’m going to need you to help me a bit.’

  Cathy shivers and shakes her head, utterly drained.

  ‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘I just want to be left alone.’

  Her speech is slow and difficult. She opens her mouth, stretching her numbed jaw.

  ‘Do you know what day it is?’ Gabrielle asks, and, getting no response, says, ‘It’s Monday. It’s a beautiful day.’

  She lifts Catherine’s legs, pivots and holds her as she sinks into the warm water, her eyes closed. Gaby gets to her feet, rubs her aching back and looks at her sister, her pale, limp body against the enamel of the hip-bath, her small breasts with their purple areolae, her long mane of brown hair streaked here and there with white. She sits on the edge of the tub, soaks a washcloth and presses it against Catherine’s collarbones, her shoulders, her neck.

  ‘Jérôme did a disappearing act again last night.’

  Cathy does not respond; she allows herself to be manhandled, staring at the limescale-encrusted tap dripping at her feet.

  ‘I worry about him, he’s left to his own devices. He won’t listen to me, he spends all this time off somewhere. I just can’t cope, what with the twins, and the work… It’s a lot for me to handle by myself, you understand?’

  She wets her sister’s hair as Catherine looks up at her, her eyes misty.

  ‘What do you expect me to do about it?’ Catherine says.

  Gabrielle sets down the washcloth and nods.

  ‘Nothing. Don’t worry. You need to get some rest, that’s all.’

  She gently soaps her sister’s arms, her armpits, her chest, shampoos her hair, massages her scalp. She reaches for the shower head, flicks the diverter and rinses Catherine off, then she sits down on the floor and leans back against the tub. The two women are motionless and silent, the only sound the regular drip of the tap.

  ‘I’ll go fetch a towel,’ Gabrielle says.

  In the bedroom, she takes boxes of pills from the chest of drawers and sets them on the dressing table. She opens them, inspects the blister packs of Tercian, Teralithe 400 and Anafranil, and pushes the capsules, which burst through the protective aluminium film and drop into her hand. From another drawer she takes a clean bath towel, then she goes to the window and closes it.

  She presses her forehead against the cool glass and closes her eyes for a moment, until the dogs are quiet, then she goes back to the bathroom. Cathy is dozing in the steaming water, the back of her head resting against the tiled wall. Gaby plunges her hand into the water and jerks the chain attached to the rubber plug. She helps her sister out of the tub, supports her as they walk back into the bedroom and sits her on a chair while she changes the sheets.

  No sooner has the bed been made than she hears Julie-Marie’s door open and she leaves Catherine’s room. In the corridor, Gabrielle runs a hand over her face, her forehead, her eyes.

  ‘Could you take over? Help her get dressed and put her back to bed? I need to get the kids ready for school.’

  The teenager nods, goes into her mother’s bedroom and closes the door behind her.

  Julie-Marie looks at Catherine, sitting askew on the chair next to the bed, shivering, the towel draped over her shoulders. A first ray of light bursts over the roof of the hangar, bathing the yard and the southern aspect of the farm, painting a patch of daylight, a luminous enclave on the bedroom floor, where motes of dust stirred up by Gabrielle’s agitation still whirl and fall, tracing a line along Catherine’s knee, above her pale, motionless leg. Julie-Marie steps forward, runs a hand over her mother’s head, untangling the knots in her damp hair, then lays the hollow of her palm against the twisted, warm, clammy neck.

  Every day, before she leaves the house to catch the bus that takes her to school, before she passes the gates and leaves behind the closed world of the farm for the hostile world beyond – this is what they all call it, marking it out as a dangerous, inhospitable terrain whose borders, like those of the farm, may be uncertain, but nonetheless exist and are vital, since they offer protection from the world beyond, from the people outside, from them, from the others – Julie-Marie comes into this bedroom to witness the benefits or the ravages night has wrought on her mother’s body.

  Daybreak sweeps through the room, storms the bed, the wall and Catherine’s face. Her eyes are closed, her brow furrowed; her daughter cannot tell whether she is enjoying the light and the quiet of the room, or whether they are simply one more trial in her long ordeal.

  ‘We need to get you dressed,’ she says.

  Catherine opens her eyes again, turns and looks up at her daughter. Her gaze expresses nothing, reveals nothing; she looks at her as at a perfect stranger.

  ‘A nightdress,’ Cathy says in a slurred voice fettered by medications, with a barely perceptible gesture towards the chest of drawers.

  Julie-Marie looks at this face, which is no more than a pale imitation of what once was her mother’s face, just as in her childhood dreams she would sometimes see pale imitations of people she loved, whose unsettling strangeness revealed slyness, deception, menace.

  She walks over to the chest of drawers, grabs a threadbare cotton nightdress printed with a faded pattern, rolls it up and slips the collar around her mother’s neck, guides the blind hands searching for the armholes, pulls the dress down over breasts that are still firm. And Julie-Marie wonders whether this is what her own smaller, paler breasts will one day look like, and what their mother infected them with when she and Jérôme suckled on unwholesome milk.

  She recognizes her own features in Catherine’s; she can see their obvious resemblance and, beyond that, the treacherous possibilities, the genealogical ramifications, the role of chance and fate or logic that has led mother and daughter to this point, the daughter caring for her mother, dressing her, combing her hair, tolerating the sight of the hairy vulva from which she emerged fourteen years earlier, and which now sits on the rush seat of the chair, pressed against it, moulded to it, so that the labia, like the thighs and buttocks, will bear a purplish imprint of the woven rushes when she gets up to lay her miserable body on the bedsheet.

  The mother has no modesty in front of the daughter: she does not attempt to pull down her nightdress if it rucks over the belly banded with stretch marks like mineral strata, the sediment of pregnancies that have strikingly altered the radiant body Julie-Marie still distantly remembers. It sometimes seems as though she revels in these lewd poses born of her illness, in displaying the depredations to which time, gravity and manic depression inexorably lead, the beginning and the ending that is the sex; the imprint of their passing on this body which already seems old, as though it is a warning, a threat levelled at the appalling youth of the daughter.

  Julie-Marie helps her sit on the edge of the bed, to pull on a pair of p
ants. From the bathroom, she fetches a pair of stainless-steel scissors with short, curved blades, crouches down and sets about meticulously cutting her toenails, collecting the disgusting translucent slivers clipped from the mother’s body in the hollow of her hand. When the tide ebbs, when exhaustion recedes, the mother recovers her charm, one that is commonplace and subdued – despite herself, she is still the same countrywoman, with her brusque gestures, her narrow ambitions, her plainness – yet marked by a natural gentleness that catches the eye because it suggests both fragility and rebelliousness. It is this palpable fault line, these relentless forces at work in some dark corner of her soul – telluric, sovereign, magnetic – that flicker on the surface, unnamed, and that once upon a time attracted the attention of local men, their looks, their lust, their dubious remarks, even if she were simply walking past the café terrace on the village square, holding her daughter’s hand; their lechery whispered in chauvinist asides.

  Sometimes, Julie-Marie has memories of the mother, radiant, in the years before the birth of Jérôme, shapes that dissolve as soon as she tries to trace their contours, fleeting, perhaps false impressions (was she not already prey to terrible bouts of sadness that heralded the breakdowns that would come later?), and so they are not hours of innocence, nor even of equanimity – it was surely written from the start that they would be denied such things – but the remaining hours of enchantment with the world. In these memories she cannot tell what is the echo, in those first years of life, of Catherine’s happiness, or of her own by contamination.

  Julie-Marie contemplates the shards of nail parings in her hand and they suddenly seem extremely precious, poignant in their banality, then, a moment later, repellent for what they actually are: the funereal debris of a body that bows, capitulates in the face of illness, allows itself to be swept away by the wave and is swallowed, slowly and inexorably, into those depths their voices can no longer reach. How long has it been now? Julie-Marie drops the nail parings onto the bedside table. A few cling to her palm. She flicks them off with her index finger, then makes a little pile on the pink marble slab ringed with cherrywood, a small, solemn, silent ossuary for some passing insect that will take the nail from the big toe back to its nest to cut its teeth. Julie-Marie supports her mother’s head as she lays her on the bed, drapes a sheet over her and tucks her in. A cloud has appeared and the bright patch scudded across the courtyard, through the bedroom, sought refuge in the angle of the wall, in the ceiling, and faded into the damp plaster.

  Catherine dozes off with Julie-Marie sitting next to her on the edge of the mattress, her elbows on her knees, her hands clasped, her face turned towards the window. Eyes fixed on the grey of the sky, she is not fourteen years of age, she is the age of children exiled from childhood, banished even before they were born; an age with no age and no history.

  The village first announces itself at a curve in the valley as the ancient walls appear ringed with plum trees, from which, in June, impatient children pick green fruits with pale, bitter stones that they bite into and spit out with a grimace.

  Next comes the soaring steeple, its shadow at this hour extending only as far as the foot of the church steps. Finally, the village square is revealed, planted with grass and chestnut trees whose bare branches thrust towards the sky beautiful, deep mahogany buds, glossy and sticky with sap, fed by the flesh of Jacques Beyries, Albert Brisard, Armand Cazaux, Claude Fourcade, Georges Frejefond, Maurice Grandjean, Jocelyn Lagarde, Paul Lasserre, Jean-Philippe Montegut, Roland Pellefigue, Jonathan Pujol, Patrice Roujas and Raymond Taupiac, who died for their country during the first and second wars, and whose bodies lie, shoulder to shoulder, in their disintegrating uniforms beneath the war memorial, a grey stone stela surmounted by a white marble plaque.

  A few steps from the soldiers, from their remains which have crawled here from the cemetery and are now pierced by the roots of the chestnut trees and crowned by molehills, the old men of the village sit on a bench of weathered stone. Chins leaning on canes, or berets pulled down over their foreheads, they spend all day keeping an eye on the comings and goings in the square and the working order of the world. When Jérôme passes, the old men say: ‘well, well’, ‘there he goes’, ‘where’s he off to now’, ‘poor lad’, ‘not right in the head’, ‘you said it’, or they say nothing at all but simply watch him pass without troubling to offer a greeting that, in any case, Jérôme would not return anymore than he seems to notice their comments.

  He takes the path past the old village washhouse, between the half-timbered houses, under whose roof tiles flocks of swallows will soon be nesting. Jérôme grips the wrought-iron handrail and carefully descends the steep, slippery steps used by hundreds of the village dead, passing the archway of the old fortifications of Puy-Larroque castle, towards the path below.

  He is thinking about the body of little Émilie Seilhan, which lies in the mud at the bottom of the huge washhouse trough, wearing a dress now green from the algae that, for decades, have embroidered the seams and hemmed her lashes and her hair with blue-green fringes. Her lips are mute, and the pale eyes staring up at the surface have long since been blinded with watery lenses. Jérôme sees the washhouse trough into which fishermen have released some carp and tench to keep the water clean, even though the washhouse has been boarded up ever since the drowning, long ago, of little Emilie, who shoos algae from her bluish face with a languid gesture, or dreamily removes a crayfish from between her lips. Jérôme descends towards the view of the fields blazing in the spring morning, and walks on to the ivy-covered walls of the cemetery.

  A simple chain and a broken padlock are all that secures the gate, from which hangs a warped and mildewed twelve-page list of those interred here, and a statement from the mayor of Puy-Larroque inviting ‘those family members with funeral concessions to clean and refurbish the graves such that they are not prejudicial to the safety of the cemetery, failing which the village council will be unable to reopen it’. But the ‘family members’ thus addressed are doubtless already buried, if not here in Puy-Larroque, then in some other country cemetery, in a crude, rough-and-ready coffin, since the names and the dates have long since worn away from these gravestones that are scarred with age and overgrown with moss, or have collapsed under their own weight and are being swallowed by the earth as the tombs beneath them cave in.

  Jérôme removes the chain and opens the gate, whose hinges have been oiled by the municipal maintenance worker. He steps inside, closes the gate behind him, then surveys the cemetery bisected by a broad set of concrete steps. Beyond the wall, he sees hillocks of earth, hovering buzzards that, from time to time, let out a cry. He hears the distant barking of hunting dogs kept in the kennel of some farm and he savours the smell of the dew-damp fields the spring sun will quickly warm.

  Ancient cypresses flank concrete slabs of steps cracked by landslips triggered by the restless village dead, who can find no peace in the earth of Puy-Larroque and turn in their cramped coffins, plumb the darkness with empty sockets into which their eyes have shrivelled and fallen. The cypresses give off a dry smell of incense and turpentine. The ground is strewn with blue-grey cones that shatter underfoot or dry out on marble tombs sticky with resin.

  Jérôme walks along the flight of steps, crouches down to examine the cracks in the concrete, made wider by the harsh frost. He slips his fingers into the sough slits, feels the cement dust, the grey earth and the flaking lichen in the crevices, beneath the watchful eye of unnailed Christs, held in place by a single, inverted hand on the cross, or fallen between two graves among the faded remnants of funeral wreaths and cypress cones. Wall lizards with banded flanks that have been lounging in the sun scuttle away and disappear beneath the tombstones. Many of them have only regenerated tails, the result of former captures they escaped only by virtue of their autotomy; but today Jérôme ignores them, and when his fingertips brush against a clutch of eggs in a damp hollow in the peat, he lifts up the shard of concrete and rolls one of the chalky oblong eggs b
etween his fingers, holds it between thumb and forefinger and lifts it towards the sun, closes his left eye and squints as he studies the veiny matrix, then puts it back and replaces the protective fragment of concrete.

  Jérôme gets up and walks slowly around the cemetery walls. He lifts up discarded tiles, shards of terracotta pots. He rummages in the rubbish tip in the southern corner of the cemetery among the flowers, some rotting, others of faded plastic, with black stalks, with spongy corollas that give off an acid perfume.

  Clouds of drosophilae rise up, forficulae and scolopendrae scuttle through brown liquid that oozes from the withered funeral wreaths, the overturned pots of brown peat, and eventually Jérôme looks away. He walks between the tombstones, beneath which some of his kin lie among the dead: the first of the fathers, the woman whose framed photograph he has seen on Henri’s nightstand, who smiles and waves to him when, in the grandfather’s absence, he creeps into the lonely room, sits on the edge of the conjugal bed and gazes at her. None of the men ever speak of her. She watches the world of the living through the small screen of the frame, thrilled when Jérôme sets her down, turning the frame so that the sunlight streaming through the window can once more warm her face.

  And yet he knows the name Élise because he has read it, carved and gilded on the marble (1924–1952), next to the name the grandfather (1921–) has had engraved on the family vault where will lie those among them whom the undertakers will lay out and lower into the belly of Puy-Larroque.

  When the rain comes down in torrents, overflowing the drainpipes, the streams and the gutters in the village, spilling down the steep slippery steps beneath the archway of the old castle and the levelled concrete slabs of the cemetery steps, the water seeps into the rich earth between the planks of the coffins and the dead shiver. Their bones clatter, they cloak themselves in strips of silk lining ripped out with their toothless jaws, press their blanched faces into the padded coffin lids, then give up, allowing themselves to sink like stones.